Road Trick

Ended up on an unexpected road trip today, so this is just a quick post from the road.

I gave my friend a small envelope this morning to hold onto.

“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “I’ve just got a bad feeling, and if it turns out to be true, I want to have a record of this.”

I asked her to keep the envelope in her bag while we drove.

Eight hours later, we passed a car in a ditch on the side of the highway. I’m guessing some kid was texting while driving and just drove off the road. Because that’s just how kids are these days. And because I come dangerously close to doing the same thing at least once every trip.

“Oh good,” I said. “I was worried it would be more serious. What’s the mile marker?”

It was 316.

“Remember that,” I told her.

When we got to our next stop, I asked for the envelope, tore it open, and showed her the message I had written before we left.

Some kind of disturbance (accident?) at mile 316.

Method

I wrote out the message and left a blank space to nailwrite in the mile number.

I went with “disturbance” rather than just “accident” so I could use pretty much anything unusual we encountered along the way as the predicted event.

Simple. But it adds a little Nostradamus energy to what would otherwise be an ordinary car ride.

He Shoots, He Scores

Here’s a trick you can do with the NBA and college basketball seasons starting up.

Imagine

“Can I get your help with something?”

I hand my friend Nate a blank deck of cards and ask him to deal through it. He starts.

“Okay, slower,” I say.

After a few cards, I ask him to go slower, and then even slower, to the point where he’s dealing just one card every seven or eight seconds.

“Okay, cool. Thanks,” I say.

I have him look through the deck to see that it’s blank on both sides, then I take it from him.

I remove four cards from my pocket. Two say SCORE on them, and two have basketballs on both sides.

“So there’s this underground gambling club I go to a couple times a month downtown. It’s not a casino, because it’s not really legal. But it’s more organized than just, like, a home game or something. There are a bunch of different tables and games going on.

“There’s poker and other typical games, but then you have all sorts of atypical things. People betting on odd versions of tic-tac-toe and Candyland and made-up games.

“Weirdly, the one thing they don’t have is sports betting. Apparently, that’s the one thing that would definitely get them shut down. You can get away with a little underground gambling, but once you start cutting into the sports-betting industry’s money, you’ve got some very powerful people who suddenly give a shit about what you’re doing.

“But it’s a bunch of guys who like to watch sports, so they came up with this sort of workaround. It’s a betting game that you play while you’re watching the game.

“The bettor places the two SCORE cards anywhere he wants in the deck. Then the dealer deals through the deck at whatever speed he wants as the game goes on. Whenever the first basket is scored, the first basketball card is dropped in. The deck is reassembled, and they do it again for the second basket of the game.

“You get paid depending on how close the basketball cards are to the SCORE cards you placed in the deck. The odds of both basketball cards landing right next to the SCORE cards are over 1,300 to one. So the payout can be pretty substantial.

“If you put down $100 and hit both, you walk out with $100,000.

“Obviously, it’s completely random. You don’t know when the teams are going to score, and you don’t know how the dealer is going to deal.

“But… what if you had someone on the inside? Someone who could make sure the teams scored at a particular time? Now you’ve eliminated one of the random elements. And what if you could learn to anticipate the dealer’s rhythm, because people tend to fall into patterns even when they’re trying not to?

“That’s what I want to test out tonight. I know when these guys are going to score, so that’s one variable down. The hard part will be trying to anticipate how you’re going to deal.”

I take the blank deck and the SCORE cards and put them somewhere in the deck without Nate seeing.

When the game starts, I have him deal through the deck.

“You don’t have to deal evenly. You can mix up the pace. But give it a couple seconds at least between cards.”

Nate begins casually dealing through the deck.

Sixteen seconds into the game, Tyrese Maxey hits a 3-pointer for Philadelphia.

“Okay, good, good,” I say.

I have Nate place the first basketball card in the deck, reassemble it, and start dealing again.

After a missed 3, a block, and two steals, Maxey hits another 3-pointer.

I grimace a little.

“Okay, they did their part. I’m not sure about your dealing, though. I wasn’t paying close enough attention.”

I have him place the other basketball card where he stopped and reassemble the deck.

The deck is spread on the table. I gently poke aside the first basketball card. Beneath it is a SCORE card.

“Holy shit. Okay. That’s one.”

We spread through and I stare at the second basketball card for a moment.

“I can’t look. You do it.”

I have Nate move the second basketball card aside. Beneath it is the other SCORE card.

I pump my fist.

“Nice. Now I just need to get Tyrese, Jalen, and the boys on board to do it again, but for real this time.”

Method

It’s just Gemini Twins.

My one concern was that telling them exactly how the game worked beforehand would make them more cognizant of the orientation of the cards. But the basketball cards have basketballs on both sides (just stickers I got on Amazon). And the rest of the deck is blank on both sides, besides the SCORE cards.

So when I take the deck back, flip it over, and spread it, the orientation—and what should be where—becomes a bit confused. All they know is that the basketball cards are right near the target cards, and that’s all that matters.

[On a logistical note, I’m going to make this up again with either larger basketball images, or fully orange cards. The version shown in the images required a bit of digging in order to find the basketball cards. Which was fine for creating some mild tension. But I’d prefer they stand out more. On the other hand, I like the SCORE cards needing to be spread a bit to be identified.]

The nice thing about using a basketball game for this is that you can point out all the missed shots, blocks, turnovers, and fouls that delayed the baskets. Any one of those plays could have gone differently, changing the timing of the scores and where the basketball cards landed in the deck. It’s a great way to drive home just how unpredictable the whole sequence was, and how easily the cards could have ended up somewhere else entirely.

This is one of a number of variations I have of Gemini Twins where the person doesn’t just choose to stop dealing at random. This is an easy way to make the trick about more than “I knew where you’d stop dealing.”

The idea that I’ve somehow convinced two teams of millionaires to script out the opening of their game just so I could win this card game is completely absurd. But there’s just enough internal logic holding it together that people can indulge in the fantasy that it might actually be true.

Mailbag #185

I’ve been messing about with double deception (beautiful trick) but im really struggling to work out a good presentational angle. I’ve got the ‘I’m building up to being able to do this this a wooden table but so far I can only manage to do it through a piece of cloth’ or ‘I’ve been reading up on how to create a tiny black hole, which means I should be able to move these two coins a very short distance’ (due to the amount of power involved I can only move the one). I remember you mentioning that you’ve played with the effect, and wondered if you had any thoughts you might be happy to share?—TB

Double Deception is a great trick. The gimmick is so invisible that I’ve accidentally spent the coins twice already. So I’m out $200. Well, $199. I did get a dollar’s worth of stuff out of it.

The weak point of the trick, to me, is that it uses two coins for no apparent reason. If I’m going to pull one coin through your shirt, why do I need another coin sitting there doing nothing? Besides disguising the method, of course.

The way I address that is like this. First, I put an X on the primary gimmick like this.

You could also just put a smudge or some other mark on it if you want the trick to feel a little less planned out. (Marking one of the coins in some way also makes getting into the trick much more straightforward as you immediatley know which coin is which.)

The premise I use is that I’m practicing my ability to target the magic.

“Like… there are certain techniques that allow you to vanish a card. That's not easy, but it's something you can learn with practice. The really hard thing is controlling the magic so precisely that you can vanish one particular card out of an entire deck, while leaving all the others untouched. Does that make sense?”

To be clear, the way I present this isn’t “I’ve been carrying around these coins so I can show you a trick.”

Instead, at some point I “notice” the coins in my pocket, spot the X, and am reminded of what I was using them for.

“Oh, let me try something with you. I’ve been testing myself on this one particular aspect of magic…”

I explain that there’s a little exercise I’ve been practicing to develop this ability, and I show them the coins. They can examine each one individually.

I then say that I’m going to try to focus the magic on one of the coins while avoiding the other.

Once the coins are set up, I ask, “Which do you prefer? The one with the X or the one without?”

If they say With the X: “Okay, I’ll try to leave you with that one.” And I pull the other coin through.

If they say Without the X: “Okay, I’ll try it with that one, then.” And I pull that coin through.

(I don’t make a big deal about this “free choice.” It’s just a passing question before moving on to the effect.)

This makes the second coin—and the fact that it doesn’t pass through—seemingly part of the challenge, rather than some weird, unnecessary element of the trick.

---

Subject: How Long Should They Be Fooled?

Just read recent posting - "A Long Question with an Unsatisfying Answer"

Years ago I started to ponder this. (Heck, over a quarter century now.) This was the result of working in a couple magic shops and having people come back to tell me what they figured out. More often than not they were right. I also started to experience this with friends, family and acquaintances.

I came up with a completely arbitrary rule at the time. One year. I wanted them to be able to remember the experience and still not know how it was done a year laer.

Now I have an additional requirement I got from Michael Close. I want them to tell the story to others without being able to say how it happened.

Ive followed up here and there and have noticed when the story is told many questions get asked about conditions around the effect. So this drives me all that much further to present effects that cant be reverse engineered. Not all my magic buddies agree with me.

[…]

To rephrase what Simon Aronson said, I dont want them to not know how it is done, I want them to know it cant be done but yet they saw it happen with their own eyes.

So a person surprised momentarily is hardly worth the effort for me.—RN

There are four things that can happen after someone sees a magic trick:

1. The spectator figures out how it was done.

2. The spectator thinks they’ve figured out how it was done, but they’re wrong.

3. The spectator figures out how it was done, but eventually forgets the explanation.

4. The spectator never figures it out.

For our purposes, numbers 1 and 2 are essentially the same. It doesn’t matter whether the spectator has correctly reconstructed the method or has come up with a completely wrong explanation. If they believe they know how it was done, the mystery is gone either way.

Number 3 is pretty much the same, too. Once you’ve figured out a trick, the mystery and wonder of that experience are gone. Even if you eventually forget the specifics of the method, you still remember that there was an explanation. I have no idea how my TV works, but I don't sit there every night marveling at the miracle of moving pictures appearing in a box. I don't need to understand the explanation to know there is one.

As far as I’m concerned, #4 is the only goal worth pursuing. I want to perform tricks that people remember but never figure out. That’s the goal, at least.

I think a lot of magicians would consider that a childish ambition. “Come on. People are going to figure out tricks. Just focus on being entertaining.”

But that strikes me as a defeatist mindset. Yes, of course people are going to figure out some tricks. But there's a difference between acknowledging that you won't always succeed and deciding that it doesn't really matter if you do. And I think that willingness to lower our ambitions is part of what has reduced magic to such a trivial pursuit in so many people's eyes.

A mystery that someone remembers for the rest of their life, without ever figuring out how it happened—that’s the romantic ideal I’m chasing when I perform.

---

Re: Wrap It Up 2.0

Please tell me you've actually used this with someone.

I was pretty jazzed to mess around with this with someone I'm messing around with but then was put off by your follow up note that "trying to attach a lubed-up condom and an empty condom wrapper to a piece of elastic to make a pull is both disgusting and entirely fruitless."

And then thinking about it further, was also like...this seems like a much more logistically complex thing to pull off than at first glance. Like...assuming this is something you want to do after intercourse, you'd likely be naked so...not sure where the pull pulls off to. Unless you get fully dressed and set up first, and then pull this off? Hmm I guess that could work and not be too odd. But then there's the added wrinkle of the lubed up condom potentially being full of additional liquid. —JT

No, I never really did that shit. But here’s your solution to the pull problem. Instead of anchoring it to your clothes, you anchor the elastic to the inside of a plastic thumbtip. You can keep the whole set-up inside there. Then, when you’re ready to perform, shove the thumbtip up your naked butthole and slide out everything and drag the elastic around your body to the front. Easy.

Dustings #153

I was scrolling through YouTube and came across this video, which is apparently a tribute to the late David Regal.

I hadn't heard that David died, but certainly he must be dead, right? Craig wouldn't have used the past tense in both the thumbnail and the title if David were still alive.

By definition you can't use the past tense to describe someone who never stops doing something unless they're dead. Because until they die, they're still doing it. Which, if I remember correctly, is sort of the whole point of the present tense.

Anyway, sad news. Does anyone know where the family is asking people to send donations in his memory? And has anyone told David?

---

Ooh, look. Luke Oseland has an actual version of the dumb idea I posted on Tuesday.

Which is good, because I can tell you from experience that trying to attach a lubed-up condom and an empty condom wrapper to a piece of elastic to make a pull is both disgusting and entirely fruitless.

---

A lot of people say real magic doesn’t exist. Okay, then explain this video, which clearly shows what happened when Dani DaOrtiz and Mat Franco accidentally swapped bodies after touching a magical fortune-telling machine at a carnival.

There is literally no other explanation for this.

Seriously, what is going on there? It’s bonkers. You know how people say you should learn magic from books instead of videos so you don’t accidentally turn into a carbon copy of someone else?

Well… Exhibit A.

{Thanks to Vincenzo R.)

A Long Question with an Unsatisfying Answer

There's a question I've been meaning to ask you for quite a while, and honestly, I'd almost prefer if you answered it on the blog, because I imagine it's something a lot of magicians have wondered about.

Yesterday, I was hired by a company to perform magic at a tech trade show [...] If I were to rank everything I performed based on audience response, the more immersive experiences you've written about would easily be at the top. Things like "Night-Night Drawings" and "Zoologic Familiars" from Love Letter 18 went over incredibly well.

[...]

Then came the usual reliable stuff that we all know works well, things like "Two Card Monte," "Double Cross," and "iThump."

But here's where things got interesting.

One of the biggest reactions of the entire event came from "Mosaic" by the French Twins [...] But there's a problem.

This is exactly the kind of effect where, if I asked the spectators five minutes later, "How do you think that was done?" I suspect a lot of them would say something like, "It's probably just an app."

Maybe they don't know how the app works, and maybe they couldn't reconstruct the actual method, but they've probably landed pretty close to the right category of explanation.

And that brings me to my question.

At what point is it worth removing an effect from your repertoire if it gets a fantastic reaction in the moment, but you suspect that shortly afterward, a good number of spectators will arrive at an explanation that's reasonably close to the actual method?

I have the same issue with "Inception."

Years ago, it worked incredibly well for me, but nowadays, after performing it, I sometimes overhear spectators whispering things like, "You know those bone-conduction earpieces they sell? Maybe it's something like that. I don't know how he knew the word, but there must be some kind of earpiece involved."

[...]

What should matter more when choosing our repertoire: the immediate reaction, or the memory that remains once someone has had a little time to rationalize what they witnessed?

[...]

Imagine you perform something for a girl, she has an amazing reaction, but later a friend of hers tells you that, a few minutes afterward, she said, "I think I know how he did that."

Even if her explanation wasn't technically correct, but was close enough to make the effect feel less impossible in her mind, would that make you stop performing it?

So, to sum up, I guess my question is:

To what extent is a great reaction in the moment worth it if the spectator is likely to come up with a plausible explanation just a few minutes later?—DM

This is going to be an unsatisfying answer, because ultimately, only you can decide how much you care about fooling people five minutes after you've finished fooling them.

The important first step is recognizing the issue. It’s surprising to me how many magicians seem to only care about the three seconds immediately following the conclusion of the magic trick. That moment of surprise where their eyes get big and their jaws drop. The moment you see on the demo videos.

This feels like success, right? The trick worked.

But we can’t say that yet. All we know at this point is that something surprising happened. We don't know if we've actually fooled them.

They haven’t yet processed the trick. That reaction is just the first step. That’s the face of someone who’s genuinely fooled. It’s also the face of someone who’s about to figure out exactly how you did it. The problem is, at that moment, those two people look identical.

In 2019, I did a five-part series on how to make your magic as strong as possible. In that series, I described the Surprise-Astonishment-Mystery pathway of spectator reactions.

1. Surprise: A spectator’s immediate reaction to a trick is Surprise.

2. Astonishment: If they can’t explain or undermine what they witnessed using their own knowledge and reasoning, Surprise becomes Astonishment.

3. Mystery: If they also can’t explain it through external sources—Googling, watching YouTube videos, asking around—or they simply don’t go looking for an explanation, Astonishment gradually becomes Mystery.

So there are two gauntlets a trick must survive: the spectator’s internal knowledge and logic, and the external resources they might turn to for an explanation.

Survive the first, and you get Astonishment. Survive both, and you have the potential to create a lasting Mystery.

When you’re performing professional walkaround magic, do you care about anything past that initial Surprise reaction?

Maybe not. You’re probably never going to see these people again. By the time they've started working out how you did the trick, you're three tables away.

As an amateur, things are different. You live with your audience. They’re your family, friends, and coworkers.

I go out of my way to avoid tricks that suffer from the Surprise Fizzle. I would much rather do a trick that gets a 7 reaction and stays a 7 in their memory than one that gets a 10 in the moment but drops to a 2 once they decide it was probably just an app or some gimmick.

Of course, it’s uncomfortable when someone you know figures out your trick. But I actually think it feels more awkward for them to have some idea of how a trick was done. They don't want to embarrass you by busting you on it. But they also don't want to play along and pretend they're baffled by something they've more or less figured out. So now you've just created this weird little social situation. This is why I always prioritize the longevity of the reaction over the initial impact of the effect.

But you’re asking about performing professionally. I don’t think there’s a universal rule here or any way I can tell you what you should do.

But I can tell you this...

For years now, I’ve heard some professionals say that they don’t care if people figure out a trick after it’s over. They don’t care if the spectators assume the deck or the coins or whatever are gimmicked. They don’t care if they Google the trick after they leave the table. “I’m just there to entertain,” they will say. “If they were entertained, that’s all that matters.”

Fair enough. But here’s the thing… I’ve never heard someone say, “I was so entertained by the magician whose tricks I more or less figured out.”

And, in fact, in almost every focus group we’ve done that collects information about how fooling a trick is and how enjoyable a trick is, there has been a direct correlation between the two.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t keep tricks in my repertoire (amateur or professional) that I didn’t think had fooling longevity.

Of course, if I found something that had a tremendous initial Surprise reaction but I suspected it faltered soon after, I wouldn’t just immediately toss it. I’d see if there were ways to account for the transparency of the method and salvage that initial surprise with a more layered, less easily dismissed method that kept the mystery alive longer.

The Tribunal

I’ve never wanted to do “guest posts” on this site. It felt like a bad habit to get into. It starts with me reluctantly agreeing to post someone else’s stuff. Then, before long, I’m begging people to send me something—anything—so I can take the day off. And eventually I’m posting every dumb thing that lands in my inbox just so I don’t have to write and can spend the afternoon on YouTube watching police bodycam footage of drunk Karens getting arrested.

And, of course, I’d have to pretend I was genuinely intrigued by whatever I was posting. “Today I have a fascinating guest post to share with you. Have you ever wondered what thickness of billet paper holds the sharpest crease when folded? I know I sure have. Well, thankfully, magician and amateur paper enthusiast Geoff Crim has written an in-depth examination of this very subject, which I’m thrilled to share with you today.”

And even if I managed to resist that temptation, I’d end up in an almost worse position: having to tell people, “Sorry, this isn’t good enough for the site.” I don’t particularly enjoy shitting on other people’s ideas. So it was always easier to have a blanket policy: “I don’t do guest posts.”

Last month, while writing a mailbag response to someone asking for advice about starting a “similar project” to this one, I started questioning this long-standing policy. And I realized that most of my concerns would disappear if I simply took the decision out of my own hands. If I had a panel of three people who could read or watch submissions and decide whether they were worth posting, then I could leave all those decisions to them.

So I reached out to a few magicians you know and asked if they’d be willing to serve in this capacity. They agreed. And that’s how things will work going forward.

If you have an excerpt from a book, a trick, or a technique you’d like to share, send it to me. I’ll pass it along to the Tribunal and let them decide whether it’s worth posting.

(One note: I’m not looking for theory pieces. This blog is so closely associated with my voice and perspective that I think it would be confusing to have someone else weighing in with their own abstract ideas about magic.)

If the Tribunal unanimously agrees that your submission is great, then I’ll happily post it.

Wait… it has to be great?

Yes.

But you post stupid shit all the time.

Yes. And this is the outlet for my stupid shit. Not yours.

Look, I’ve spent years building an audience willing to put up with my dipshittery. If you want people to put up with yours, you have to build your own audience. If you want to borrow mine, you have to bring something better.

This is likely not going to happen very often, if at all. But if it does, what I’m trying to do is create a win-win-win situation for everyone.

The readers get a great piece of content from someone whose work they might not have encountered otherwise.

The person submitting gets a chance to share their ideas with 1000s of readers and potentially generate interest in whatever else they might be working on.

And I get to spend the afternoon watching a 53-year-old woman in a leopard-print blouse explain to six police officers that they have no jurisdiction over her because she pays their salaries.

Wrap It Up 2.0

One of the greatest tricks ever, in my opinion, is Wrap It Up by Jay Sankey.

The first time I saw it, Sankey himself performed it live at a lecture. I genuinely felt like I saw a chewed piece of gum placed on a wrapper, tossed into the air, rewrap itself, and become unchewed. The illusion was perfect. I truly felt like I saw and heard the wrapper snapping itself back around the gum.

And the logic makes sense: You don’t want to have to keep buying gum, so you reuse the same piece over and over.

But is it… you know… adult enough?

Chewing gum is fine for Junior, but what about me? A virile man who doesn’t want to spread his seed?

Introducing… Wrap It Up: Jerx Edition.

After intercourse, pretend to remove your rubber, place it on the open condom wrapper, and restore it.

“I’ve been using the same one since college,” you say proudly, “and it’s still mostly intact.”